= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Lumifer comments on The Robots, AI, and Unemployment Anti-FAQ - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (267)
This sounds way too much like a cached thought to me. I'd like to see empirical data for that.
In general, however, we're talking about optimal planning horizons for businesses. As soon as you formulate the problem this way it becomes obvious that the answer is "it depends". I don't think a useful generic answer is possible -- businesses, from an iPhone-case producer to, say, Intel, are too diverse for that.
A related question (much studied, I think) is the impact of the agency problem on business management. It surely exists but I don't know whether it translates so straightforwardly into preferences for the short term and unjustified discounting of the long term.
Note that privately held companies includes both companies held by a family (which tend to be less well managed because of the frictional costs associated with replacing upper management) and companies held by private equity firms (which tend to be well-managed). The NBER paper gwern linked through Hanson is available here, and if that link doesn't work for you I can email you a pdf.
A quote from it:
Thanks for the link, it works. The paper's interesting but will take a bit of time to dig through and I can already see some iffy things in there (e.g. using sales growth as the measure of investment opportunities available). But I'll hold off expressing opinions until I read through it...
A thought being cached is not evidence against it.
OK, I'll be more explicit :-)
It sounds like memetic junk which on the surface looks plausible and has been circulating via the popular media for a long time though its empirical foundations are doubtful and it's usually formulated in too generic a fashion to be of any use.
As I might have mentioned before, my prior with respect to popular economic wisdom is that it's false.
Here's two links: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/02/econ-advice-confirmed.html and http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/02/info-market-failure.html
So let's take a look at these links.
From the first one:
I don't think this supports the claim made.
The second link points to a NBER article behind a paywall (for me). Looking at the abstract, however, it doesn't say anything about preferences for long-term vs short-term. The most relevant data point that I see is that private firms invest more (as % of assets) than public firms, but I'd want to see the details of the study before coming to a conclusion about what that means.
It certainly is consistent with the claim made, even if it is not as on-point as the second link I had been searching for, and so I included it.